Splatoon 3 at The Big House 11
For the best interest of everyone involved, we the Splatoon tournament organizers alongside the head TBH11 event organizers have made an extremely heavy decision to cancel Splatoon 3 at The Big House 11.
At the onset of the announcement of Big House, Raze and myself were approached to consider whether it was best to pursue running Splatoon again. Even during that first conversation, we knew things would look different this year. Various circumstances that allowed us to create the success of last year were different this year, by factors outside our control. After the awesome event we had last year and especially considering how much The Big House helped us and nurtured a relationship with the community, we both wanted to make the most of what we could and show our devotion to working together on creating an exciting experience for players.
One of the factors is the calendar of events. The saturation of tournaments was something the SplatLANs TOs have been discussing since early last year. More LANs are great, but our playerbase doesn’t have the density nationwide to make events that happen at the frequency we see with Smash, so the audience we see at these events is made of repeat attendees. Everyone’s wallets are hurting this year, and most players can’t afford multiple trips in such a short time, or if they can then they also risk burning out. Combined with the timing in the school year, Big House fell on a very awkward spot on the calendar for players.
Another factor is the personal bandwidth we have this year to support and run the event. Even knowing this and the risk it posed to how the event would perform, we wanted to try and overcome that with a marketing presence similar to last year. However, many things in our personal lives prevented us from pushing the tournament as much as we had liked. For both of us, we had bitten off more than we could chew.
Delivering a proper tournament experience is why players sign up. Without the proper mental and financial resources to put on an event of a reasonable caliber, we feel that to continue forward would not meet the expectations of anyone involved with the tournament. We also want to announce this far enough ahead of time so that the few players who have already signed up and made travel plans would be given ample time to adjust their plans. Canceling now will help us maintain a mutually beneficial partnership, in order to create something special for the scene in the future, something that players won’t want to miss out on. Everyone involved with making this decision is in agreement on one thing: we’d like to maintain a good faith partnership between Splatoon Community and TBH for potential future events.
This decision was not easy. I feel as though I’m admitting defeat, but in my mind, I know this is the most responsible thing I could do. If anyone is upset with this, I want to hear them out and talk with them personally. By the time this is posted, I’ll have already communicated with the players signed up for the event. There’s still a lot of Splatoon to be played, and I know for a fact bigger and better events are to come, but this one wasn’t able to bloom. Thank you for reading this, and I hope to see you all at another event soon.
Best,
Magic8Ball (Splatoon 3 tournament organizer)